


they say sunlight heals all wounds (the same way our faces grow young in our tombs)

by Lexis_Cheshire



Category: DreamSMP, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: ...Kinda, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Not Human, Apocalypse, Found Family, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Apocalypse, have you considered the devastating consequences of involuntary immortality? if not, heavy themes of death, icon au, is it natural progression is it world war, maybe its maybelline, maybe its the crushing desolation, no one is suicidal but. immortality is inherently difficult after a while, of being the only five sapient beings that will endure for nearly all of eternity, started out as crack and now we're here, the brainrot is so very real, the world ends but nonlinearly, vaguely suicidal-sounding text, who knows - Freeform, you will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28119216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexis_Cheshire/pseuds/Lexis_Cheshire
Summary: they are icons, shaped by thousands of thoughts.who are you, to create yourself? who are you, to escape yourself?it was ouroboros and lemniscates, endless spirals and hungering snakes. it was them, and they were fake, they made their own stakes and it was far, far too late when they realized(that they had made a mistake).(a series of vignettes, on becoming what you are perceived).EDIT 1/6/2021: I do not support the despicable actions of cmc. thus he has been removed and replaced with Quackity.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19
Collections: Iconography





	they say sunlight heals all wounds (the same way our faces grow young in our tombs)

the Earth was dying.

  
the Earth was dying, and they were watching it. fire and radiation and red red red, spilled careless (like light on the wine-dark sea) wine-dark in a temple of car crashes and defunct police sirens and that golden hour of golden flame before the Sun set.

it ran slow, inexorable, creeping across the burst asphalt of the hollowpoint citadel. a city bathed in eternal daytime as long as lava counted as sunlight, obsidian spikes formed under manhole covers and windowsills of shattered glass.

there was not so much as a bug crawling by, nothing to witness the ruins of what once were titans (where steel scraped the sky and smoke stained the stars) nor the remnants of what once were humans on the warped shell of a burnt-out Earth.

two figures lay still, prone in the crosswalk of the identically ubiquitous city intersection.

theirs was the image of untouched islands, of bunkers that had never seen daylight. a patch of paradisical illusion over age-old relics, with clean clothes and uncooked skin and the ability to do more than scream. surrounded by grave markers twenty stories high and they were too tired to mourn, anymore, for a foolish race of beings that went fast and bright and out too soon.

(that went quiet and consuming and who had left them behind).

the grit of embers and gravel crunched under their backs. above, dust stormed in tandem with volcanic glass, zephyrs of snarling inanimate rage as they slammed into girders, balconies, through rotted doorframes. the two were pelted with hailing rocks the size of fists. none made a difference.

the first being was, impossibly, human—pristinely preserved, as if one had taken a still image and forced it into reality—as bright as stopsigns were at night, as if he moved at odds with the standstill world that had long burned the remains of mankind from the surface of the planet. human, and young at that, stubbornly smiling and smooth-skinned under the drape of a navy sweater and ratty sneakers unsinged, as mint-perfect as one couldn't be in the aftermath of city-strewn apocalyptica. nothing fazed him, nor even affected him—not the blistering heat or the being beside him, even as frost crept forwards and back across the blacktop, even as the air boiled between with long-lost humidity. there he sprawled, cracking whip-quick jokes and cackling with laughter. alive.

(alive?)

the second person in question was taller, thinner, and colder, in literal definition if not metaphorical.

(much, much colder).

the kind that froze the ground inches underneath him stiff and gleaming with fractals, swirling patterns as it melted and reformed and streamed into split-second mist. his skin followed suit, pale as evening snow, as dry ice, as seafoam and salt flats and nuclear winter. he, with searing halogen-light that spilled from his eyes, pinprick constellations flaring on his cheeks, hair ever-shifting in blue-purple-dark that stretched through his neck, his arms, his skin, facsimiles of veins in the most unnatural of ways. he smiled at the human, an orange-shaped slice of Void that defied illumination, like vantablack on pomegranate guts, tilting on a different axis to reality as it stained his forearms with vacuum. stars danced on his fingertips as he waved his hands through the clouds of steam. the human(?) only grinned back, unthinking as he did just the same, undisturbed by the brush of scorching arctic.

above them, time passed.

above them, the sky turned to ash.

below, magma roiled into critical mass.

———————————————

  
the Sun was dying.

the Sun was dying, and alex hadn’t been breathing for—

for—

fuck, who _knows_ how long? it wasn’t as if he needed it, it wasn't as if it mattered, not since...not since...

~~friends and laughter and video-game bombs, shitty twitch clips and improv songs, all gone, all gone—~~

...not since everything he had ever known went to pieces. (literally).

because as it turns out, Venus had been the prototype, Earth had been next on the list, and natural disasters were what happened when the atmosphere and all that lava choked life out and grand slammed it into orbit.

who would have guessed.

(yeah, that's right. everybody. and it hadn't made a difference in the end, if it was a few generations or a few hundred).

and as anyone could have foreseen...space was boring. and burning. and had been freezing, too. _he’s kind of really fucking cold. he kind of can't fucking breathe._

but don’t worry, he was used to it! he had a few millennia with what amounts to the personification of The Eternal Universe, or maybe just space, without the 'maybe'—at least he was decent company—to get all adjusted and cheery and lose feeling in his lungs. them's the works, baby!

so. space. it wasn't all that cracked up as they said in high school, not that he was paying attention. also, apparently, there was more life...thataway and a few dozen lightyears, according to spaceman over there. we weren't alone! there were others!

he wasn't in a rush to get there.

light years, y'know.

or.

maybe it was nostalgia, maybe it was mourning, maybe it had been that stubborn hope that things would change. _maybe it's the sick sorrow of knowing it won't, and wishing it anyway_.

and, well. he had grown up in this arm of the Milky Way. we all had. you all know this. it needed no explanation and sure as hell no justification, 'cause we were human and you understand.

...and also that the Sun—that Sun— _was_ the first one he’d ever known, and _maybe_ he had needed to mourn, and maybe he had been a bit nostalgic for his old home! maybe he was! maybe he was. and it wasn't like anyone was around to begrudge him the time to pay respects to the fuckin' ball of gas, not anyone that hadn't been, y'know, also picking out the best looking asteroid around or off trying to catch a comet for the gravestone or whatever. 

anyway. me perdonas, yeah, ‘cause the world kept turning and the world kept burning and at the end of it he really didn’t know nobody, none of the bodies, charred as they were.

or something.

oh yeah! so, bill nye the space guy was the reason he hadn't been basically scattered across a few parsecs (isn't that a cool word?) after the whole 'Earth is dead' thing...happened. fun times with his pal, it was, who had a body temperature of dry ice in the Antarctic, did you know it hurt like fuck to touch that stuff? not like i would have complained, though, seeing as he'd managed to keep track of the, like, bits (haha) of planet remains and also all our collective asses (it had what we were camping out on right then, too, the remains of. of...hell if he knew, Canada? Norway? ...Ireland? 

it didn't matter. it doesn't matter. it would have been just a month or so before the Sun started going supernova—pretty good timing, that was. in my opinion! but also just truth. and the andromeda cluster just didn’t have the same familiarity to it, y’know? y’know? y...

...hey, daniel.

huh? oh, just myself.

yeah, i know.

(in the lowlight of space, the yellow shine of extinct wings).

...thanks.

(a cartoonishly crooked smile, comically out-of-place).

...i miss them.

...

how much left until...

right. right. 

...

seeya.

after all, we’ve got all the time in the world.

right, Dan? hahahahaha...

the Sun never looked so beautiful, in death.

———————————————

he's just happy the Sun (that Sun) isn't alive in the first place.

he really, really is.

it could have been, after all. and really, it's not that he's happy the Sun's going supernova, nothing so similar. but.

well.

when one out of your five-person squadron of millenium-old morons is, in fact, a star, you get kind of fucking paranoid and sad and maybe even a tiny little bit annoyed about the whole ordeal. when they're the only one out of all them with even the concept of a visible age applying, with the possibility of an end (and he'd say that was terrible if he was a century younger or twenty and could still hug his similarly human friends, but nowadays it's more of a blessing than anything else, that one of them would get to rest). and wasn't that sad and tragic and annoyingly pretentious, hel-lo english degree, and he could run himself in circles and never get anywhere and he'd been losing more of himself every day, slowly, slowly, slowly.

the truth is that humans were not built to last.

(so what the fuck are _they_? what the fuck _are_ they?)

lost in the pachinko asteroid field that was once Earth, populated as it was with the only remnants left of humanity--three immortals in relatively human face, the embodiment of a sun, and him(apparently, the manifestation of All Space, and who the hell decided it was a good idea to give antigravity to a twenty-five-year-old youtuber? who?)

the choking expanse in which was two people stuck with the faces of children, metal-mouthed and insect-winged, where resided a man that would be human if only he were dead, (if only, and a million other things), the only person he could make skin contact with without causing instant frostbite(and no, just because it wasn't ~~was never~~ permanent didn't mean he wanted to cause that pain, you fuckers), and him. (who is only recognizable from his original form by conjecture and the parody of his likeness cast in aerogel and dark matter and useless glasses frames, hauling around the few thousand tons of rock left over from the destruction of his only home, no big deal, no big deal, no big deal).

considering the end of all humanity, there's really was no hope for an off switch on the world-bending ride of a night of a lifetime. if only he had enjoyed it. if only he had cherished his mortal life. (if it could be called a life at all, immortal too young to have mattered).

and really, was it actually life if there was no death to show for it? if they didn't breathe didn't eat didn't sleep dream or even have a heartbeat, if all that remained of them was a caricature of themselves more steeped in fiction that reality and god he'd miss the taste of hot coffee if he could remember what it fucking felt like—

like—

he's just happy the sun can still die.

(if only he could, too).

———————————————

life was dying.

life was dying, and two figures wandered the shattered pavement of the empty suburbs.

their fellows-in-arms had not accompanied them, had opted to traverse the bones of the slain beast. the city, crumbled, broken-towered, caving in as they move, not a thought given to the debris as they spoke languidly about the end of all things, as they drifted wraithlike and all-too-normal-looking in unoccupied intersections...their friends, monuments to careers already made, were content to stay amongst the husks of cars and those who thought they could leash the stars, content(?) to walk aimlessly through the citadel, coated as it was in abandonment and dust and the afterimage of abaddon. a natural disaster, a manmade grave, both and neither and it was all the same.

they elected to leave, instead.

for they were younger, (if only by a scant few years and a eon immortalized in unmoving faces), energetic through the virtue of existence and none else but nonetheless so for it, and they hopped across the cracks in the world and chattered aimlessly through the heat-haze mirage of air. radiation scorched ineffectually on their skin, matching shades of healthy human, spots of color amongst the pale papyrus-walled houses.

in the golden blood of the red-eyed Sun they could have almost pretended it was alive. that the grass was only washed out by the late hour, that people were just behind the rows of closed doors, that it was summer not spring so there were no flowers, that there would never be worse. memories of days spent in unhurried joy overlaid with the blurred edges of chimneys, clean roads over unendingly monotone suburbia.

but sheets of light draped heavy as syrup and twice as sickly on the backs of their necks, the weight of a thousand little deaths and a million tragedies. they stood on the grave of billions and their bones would cremate into soot and nothing would ever grow from it. they watered the earth but it was half salt and they both pretended it was raining.

(it wasn't. it couldn't be. it was nice to dream, but dreams were for children and that's all anyone would ever see, that's all they would never be (again).

almost is such a cruel word).

the first was brighteyed, blue as the old old sky, clear as sparkling sea on golden sand swept down his head. he wore white, red across his shoulders like sunlight given form. knees torn open and unmarred denim, shoes trampled clean through acres of concrete, fiber worn only enough for the image of movement and all untouched by the flames licking up the potholes. he grinned, and metal glinted off his teeth, perfectly straight. his voice rang loud and lively, and the other nodded simply in response.

the other in question was similarly light-haired, uv-bleached at the ends of what might have once been brown. his words were calm, were casual, eyes like rich topsoil (long turned to ash) and a bleeding tie to match. a tailored suit, a rumpled shirt, transparent wings and shiny loafers that kept it's mirror-polish when he kicked rocks into the gaping crevasses strewn through driveways and empty lawns. iridescence blurred behind shoulderblades as they scaled the rupture of a rocky avenue, street sign tucked under his arm.

the first grinned, automatic as anything, and the second smiled in turn, exactly the same. they continued.

the suit melted down to the green shirt, hung one size large off his shoulders and clumsily mis-buttoned in a mimicry of childishness. the glare of the Sun cast itself on stone, curled over the back of the first, blue-coated and white-sashed in gilded tricorn hat. sat on shingled roofs, they pointed out indistinguishable shapes in the pumice clouds, pierced only by the too-large star and a sky stained dark, identically unaffected as they watched the Sun's rays melt more pits in the asphalt below.

it would never be their time to die.

———————————————

~~is he dying?~~

it burned it burned it burned it burned it burned—

and then it didn't.

(maybe that was worse).

he woke up and his house was aflame, and his eyes were solar flares and he could blind himself if he smiled. he woke up and the sky was so empty and so clear and so uniform and so empty and he stared straight into the Sun and smiled. he woke up and he wasn't tired and he burned up his camera lens when he smiled. he woke up and he worked for three days straight on misplaced energy and forgot not to look in the mirror when he smiled.

he stopped waking up, on account that he couldn't go to sleep in the first place.

he smiled.

(what else could he do?)

he ran recordings and laughed and sang and stopped showing his face, and his friends stopped showing his face, and a dozen more over a dozen months or more, or more, or more. screaming and collabs and his hand melting through the mouse, and scorch marks on every cabinet, an ash pit where he once slept and a sundial stark in his mind.

he went outside and looked up and couldn't stop and he was on fire and he was fire and the grass was dead.

(his house was gone long before the sky fell down).

he went outside and he went where other people were and it went wrong.

(why? why? why?)

he stayed inside and the moon overhead glared bright and he burned up and it didn't hurt, and maybe that was worse. maybe that was worse.

(what the fuck was happening to him?)

and then there was cold again, and then there was someone that wouldn't lose their mind just standing in the blast radius, someone who had built themselves around disaster (just the same, just the same), someone who knew, made of vacuum and asters. and more, after that, changelings cursed with their own lives, and he shouldn't have been so happy about it, about halved time and the minefields that existence became, about the friends that had been thrown through the looking-glass, the funhouse mirror-maze and came out on the other side not quite right, and so, so very wrong.

(he was so, so glad he wasn't alone).

he stayed inside and inside was safe, he woke up pressed to the ceiling and told himself he didn't care.

and even then he had known, when the abyss above the surface of Earth had yawned and he nearly fell right into it, when the clouds were only a brush away, when grocery shopping became cult followings at three in the morning and he wished they didn't fall silent when he looked back.

(wishes never did anything).

he stopped going outside, on account that he couldn't be himself long enough to make it matter.

and he pushed on. what else could he do? death would not be for a hundred lifetimes, a thousand, more. he called it luck, called it karma, called himself his name and pretended he still lived in it the same.

the trouble wasn't with his eventual end, after all. it was living in what could have been—knowing he would see darkness only after everyone else—and still he could not help but to hurt them with it. still, he could do naught but burn ahead. time stopped for no one he knew.

dying was never his problem.

dying was not the beast to fear.

dying was never the question in the first place.

(what worth was his death? he had stopped breathing long, long, long ago.)

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this was enjoyable! Icon au is wonderful and I have so much fun.  
> ...if somehow ppl from red shot are here, I'm so sorry for the radio silence but I swear I'm not gonna abandon it...one way or another it will be finished.


End file.
